They may be right: Some of the media placements that OMD cited in its award-winning work are flawed because they ask users to search for information in under-ground locations where there is no web service.

Here's the winning campaign for Google. It's certainly clever—OMD bought posters near historic sites and then spelled out on them phonetically things users might want to search for. So in the Baker Street underground station, a poster said, "Shur-lok hoemz."

The allegations call into question—again—the integrity of the world's premier advertising awards competition. (Last year, a fake ad for Kia won a Lion which the festival had to pull after I exposed that it was a fraud.)

"One thing I've noticed this year in particular some practices creeping in that are a bit disturbing," said Sorrell, speaking to MediaGuardian. "Practices of pressure on the jury by [the chairman] of the judges. There are some techniques to these things. I was at a dinner and there was lots of chatter about one of the functional areas [awards categories] where lots of pressure was put on an organisation in terms of voting."

Ikon's Johnson went further. He told B&T “the best work didn’t win gold" because certain judges were “ordered” to support work from their sister agencies:

Johns told B&T: “Unfortunately after six days of judging the best work didn't win gold, that is a view held by a number of the jury members. In these situations you have two choices; either to sit back and do nothing or raise your hand and say enough is enough."

The media jury was chaired by Mainardo de Nardis, CEO of Omnicom-owned agency OMD Worldwide. OMD, of course, owns Manning Gottlieb OMD, the agency that won the Grand Prix for its Google Voice Search campaign.